3 Free Tools To Boost Your Content Marketing Efforts

September 22, 2016

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The beauty of the internet is that it never stops expanding. From design tools to directions, live streaming to LinkedIn, E-Sports to encyclopaedias, the database of helpful functions that you can find on the web keeps on growing. If you’re a content marketer, this can only be good news.

There are an illimitable number of options out there that allow you to experiment with your creativity and measure the success of your campaigns. We’ve picked out some of our favourites, which will help you to boost your content marketing.

Reddit

You may not see this as a content marketing tool but there is much more to Reddit than meets the eye.

The number of average monthly Reddit page views stands at 8.19 billion – so if you pick and choose the Subreddits which you join and participate in carefully, you can share both your own content, as well as your expertise, to an extremely large audience.

Like any other social networking platform, it will take time for other users to recognise your voice and to interact with you on a regular basis, but as long as you are transparent and consistent in your contribution, it will reap rewards.

You’ll find that building mutually beneficial relationships is one of the keys to Reddit. If you post your own content onto several different Subreddits without leaving any comments on other posts, a community member will assume you have no real interest in the topic and that you are only using the platform to spam. So in essence, you reap what you sew.

Quora

Put simply, as well as being highly useful for content marketers, this tool is a lot of fun.

In the words of its creators, Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. It is a question-and-answer website. You can ask any question you want, from “What are the optimal siege tactics for taking Magic Kingdom’s Cinderella Castle?” to “How should you use data to inform content marketing strategy?”

Every answer that is submitted by a user can be ‘upvoted’ or ‘downvoted’ by other users. This is where your knowledge comes into play. If you provide insightful, helpful answers, you will stand out in the community, and this will make others want to follow your profile.

There are certain ‘topics’ – for example, over 50,000 users follow ‘content marketing’, meaning that questions relating to this topic will appear on their Quora newsfeed.

So not only will you find answers that will give you solutions to tricky content marketing problems, but you can also give back to the community by imparting your own knowledge and opinion. This tool really is a win-win.

Pocket

How often do you find yourself skimming through an article, or reading its headline, only to think “That looks good – but I haven’t got the time to read all of it right now”?

Well, Pocket makes sure that you don’t forget about these articles, allowing you to compile a list of content which to want to revisit when you can afford to. Whether it be a story written on a news website, a video bulletin or an important Word Document, Pocket lets you store it away neatly for another time.

You don’t have to worry about different browsers either – Pocket is compatible with over 1500 apps and on Android, iPhone iPad, and desktop.

One of this app’s great features is that through adding your Facebook friends and the people, you follow on Twitter, you can create a list of content that people within your social networks have ‘Pocketed’ – which saves you even more time.

When you set your account up, you are presented with a list of users to follow – most of whom are well-informed individuals such as BBC journalists or New York Times reporters. You receive a notification when someone within your network shares a piece of content, and when someone follows you.

So if your daily commute is taken longer than usual, or you are sitting around waiting for a client to arrive, you can spend the spare time you have reading, watching, or listening to things which under normal circumstances, would have disappeared from your radar forever.

So there you have it – three simplistic tools whose intuitive interfaces and aesthetically pleasing designs mean they are a must-have for any content marketer who is looking to get ahead of the game and be more efficient.